Issue 21 - Maplibre
Welcome to another edition! I’m Daniel Imfeld, and here I share things I’ve read recently, updates on what I’ve been working on, and occasionally nascent blog post drafts.
Two announcements this week. First, I finished my post on Loading Geographic Data in a Format You can Actually Use. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. This time I asked a few people to read it before I published. This was the first time I’ve had anyone pre-read an article, and it greatly improved the quality of the explanations in a few places.
The other big news is that I’m starting development on a Svelte wrapper for the MapLibre GL mapping library. MapLibre is a fork of MapBox, and since it’s native to WebGL, you get all sorts of nice features like smooth zoom and pixel shaders. Most of the GL complexity is hidden though, so it’s just as easy to use as Leaflet if you don’t want to write your own shaders. Pretty happy with it so far. There’s still a lot of progress to be made, but you can star it on Github or check out the Example Site to track the progress.
Links and Reading
Creatively Misusing TLA+ by Hillel Wayne. This quote stuck out:
TLA+ does worst-case model checking, so it fails if it finds any path to an error. This opens a famous trick: if you want to find the set of steps that solve a problem, write a property saying “the problem isn’t solved” and make that an invariant. Then any behavior that finds the solution also breaks the invariant, and the model checker will dutifully spit out the set of steps in that behavior.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, I’d love if you share it with a friend (sign up here) or just reply to this email with your thoughts.